We wish them well, good fortune, and safety on and off the field.
Hope – it is such a human thing. People with NO hope are one picture of what it can mean to be human, and people WITH hope are quite another picture of what it means to be who we are. Each of us probably can think of similar circumstances in which one person we know has remained hopeful, and another has felt beaten down and virtually hopeless. Upon careful reflection, we can see that one’s hope does not arise from the circumstances themselves, but from something or someone else. Nor does the hopelessness arise only from the circumstances, but from a wider back story of pain, fear, disappointment, or failure. From Job to Jesus, our heritage of faith guides us and encourages us. Genuine faith engenders and blesses hope. Genuine faith doesn’t ignore the stories that can drain us of the strength to hope or of the clarity of mind to see good reason for hope. Rather, faith helps us to see, believe, trust that whatever the shadow in which we stand just now, hope is both the means of journeying through it and beyond it, as well as the solid ground to which we will arrive. Years ago I was a patient in an Emergency Department where I usually worked. It was a bad day, for me and seemingly for many people! It was loud in there and beds were too few to give all of us somewhere reasonably comfortable to be. I remember feeling about as low on the “hope scale” as I ever had been. Then, without warning, one person on staff almost walked past me and didn’t. That person stopped and looked right into my eyes. Those eyes “said” what I couldn’t summon up in myself. They said that I wasn’t alone and I would be okay. I hadn’t been and wasn’t able to pray in a conventional sense at that moment, but I know my prayers had just been answered. I will see those eyes of Jesus for the rest of my life, and I will try to let Jesus see through my eyes to answer someone else’s prayer, spoken or unspoken, for just as long!